How realistic are the vengeful whales of “Moby-Dick” and “In the Heart of the Sea,” really? - Quartz:
In the movie version of In the Heart of the Sea, the sperm whale goes beyond the historical account of the whale smashing into the Essex. It also hounds the whale boats in which the crew escape the sinking ship, ramming the small vessels and breaching on top of them. This cetacean Cujo storyline squares with neither the chronicles of theEssex survivors nor with what we know about sperm whale behavior. The film “is doing a disservice to the whales,” says Shane Gero, a behavioral ecologist at Aarhaus University’s institute for bioscience."
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Gentle giants—or monsters of the deep? (Flickr user Biodiversity Heritage Library (licensed under CC-BY-2.0;
image has been cropped))
"Mess with a sperm whale, get an 80-ton torpedo—one that will sink a ship and, like a giant mammalian Jaws, stalk the surviving crew across the ocean. That, at least, is the plot of Ron Howard’s cinematic rendering of In The Heart of the Sea. Based on the 2000 book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it’s a loose retelling of the 1821 sinking of the whaleship Essex, after an enormous sperm whale bashed in its hull with its head. The story eventually helped inspire Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, which describes a whaleship captain’s self-destructive obsession with hunting down the white sperm whale that sank a previous ship and severed his leg.In the movie version of In the Heart of the Sea, the sperm whale goes beyond the historical account of the whale smashing into the Essex. It also hounds the whale boats in which the crew escape the sinking ship, ramming the small vessels and breaching on top of them. This cetacean Cujo storyline squares with neither the chronicles of theEssex survivors nor with what we know about sperm whale behavior. The film “is doing a disservice to the whales,” says Shane Gero, a behavioral ecologist at Aarhaus University’s institute for bioscience."
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